Complete Works (226 page)

How do you mean?

First of all, if our city has to fight a city of the sort you mention, won’t it be a case of warrior-athletes fighting against rich men?

Yes, as far as that goes.

Well, then, Adeimantus, don’t you think that one boxer who has had the best possible training could easily fight two rich and fat nonboxers?

Maybe not at the same time.

Not even by escaping from them and then turning and hitting the one who caught up with him first, and doing this repeatedly in stifling heat and sun? Wouldn’t he, in his condition, be able to handle even more than [c] two such people?

That certainly wouldn’t be surprising.

And don’t you think that the rich have more knowledge and experience of boxing than of how to fight a war? I do.

Then in all likelihood our athletes will easily be able to fight twice or three times their own numbers in a war.

I agree, for I think what you say is right.

What if they sent envoys to another city and told them the following truth: “We have no use for gold or silver, and it isn’t lawful for us to [d] possess them, so join us in this war, and you can take the property of those who oppose us for yourselves.” Do you think that anyone hearing this would choose to fight hard, lean dogs, rather than to join them in fighting fat and tender sheep?

No, I don’t. But if the wealth of all the cities came to be gathered in a single one, watch out that it doesn’t endanger your nonwealthy city. [e]

You’re happily innocent if you think that anything other than the kind of city we are founding deserves to be called
a city
.

What do you mean?

We’ll have to find a greater title for the others because each of them is a great many cities, not
a
city, as they say in the game. At any rate, each of them consists of two cities at war with one another, that of the poor and that of the rich, and each of these contains a great many. If you
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approach them as one city, you’ll be making a big mistake. But if you approach them as many and offer to give to the one city the money, power, and indeed the very inhabitants of the other, you’ll always find many allies and few enemies. And as long as your own city is moderately governed in the way that we’ve just arranged, it will, even if it has only a thousand men to fight for it, be the greatest. Not in reputation; I don’t mean that, but the greatest in fact. Indeed, you won’t find a city as great as this one among either Greeks or barbarians, although many that are many times its size may seem to be as great. Do you disagree? [b]

No, I certainly don’t.

Then this would also be the best limit for our guardians to put on the size of the city. And they should mark off enough land for a city that size and let the rest go.

What limit is that?

I suppose the following one. As long as it is willing to remain
one
city, it may continue to grow, but it cannot grow beyond that point.

That is a good limit. [c]

Then, we’ll give our guardians this further order, namely, to guard in every way against the city’s being either small or great in reputation instead of being sufficient in size and one in number.

At any rate, that order will be fairly easy for them to follow.

And the one we mentioned earlier is even easier, when we said that, if an offspring of the guardians is inferior, he must be sent off to join the other citizens and that, if the others have an able offspring, he must join [d] the guardians. This was meant to make clear that each of the other citizens is to be directed to what he is naturally suited for, so that, doing the one work that is his own, he will become not many but one, and the whole city will itself be naturally one not many.

That
is
easier than the other.

These orders we give them, Adeimantus, are neither as numerous nor as important as one might think. Indeed, they are all insignificant, provided, as the saying goes, that they guard the one great thing, though I’d rather [e] call it sufficient than great.

What’s that?

Their education and upbringing, for if by being well educated they become reasonable men, they will easily see these things for themselves, as well as all the other things we are omitting, for example, that marriage, the having of wives, and the procreation of children must be governed as
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far as possible by the old proverb: Friends possess everything in common.

That would be best.

And surely, once our city gets a good start, it will go on growing in a cycle. Good education and upbringing, when they are preserved, produce good natures, and useful natures, who are in turn well educated, grow up even better than their predecessors, both in their offspring and in other [b] respects, just like other animals.

That’s likely.

To put it briefly, those in charge must cling to education and see that it isn’t corrupted without their noticing it, guarding it against everything. Above all, they must guard as carefully as they can against any innovation in music and poetry or in physical training that is counter to the established order. And they should dread to hear anyone say:

People care most for the song
That is newest from the singer’s lips.
²

Someone might praise such a saying, thinking that the poet meant not [c] new songs but new ways of singing. Such a thing shouldn’t be praised, and the poet shouldn’t be taken to have meant it, for the guardians must beware of changing to a new form of music, since it threatens the whole system. As Damon says, and I am convinced, the musical modes are never changed without change in the most important of a city’s laws.

You can count me among the convinced as well, Adeimantus said.

Then it seems, I said, that it is in music and poetry that our guardians must build their bulwark. [d]

At any rate, lawlessness easily creeps in there unnoticed.

Yes, as if music and poetry were only play and did no harm at all.

It is harmless—except, of course, that when lawlessness has established itself there, it flows over little by little into characters and ways of life. Then, greatly increased, it steps out into private contracts, and from private contracts, Socrates, it makes its insolent way into the laws and government, until in the end it overthrows everything, public and private. [e]

Well, is that the way it goes?

I think so.

Then, as we said at first, our children’s games must from the very beginning be more law-abiding, for if their games become lawless, and the children follow suit, isn’t it impossible for them to grow up into good and law-abiding men?
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It certainly is.

But when children play the right games from the beginning and absorb lawfulness from music and poetry, it follows them in everything and fosters their growth, correcting anything in the city that may have gone wrong before—in other words, the very opposite of what happens where the games are lawless.

That’s true.

These people will also discover the seemingly insignificant conventions their predecessors have destroyed.

Which ones?

Things like this: When it is proper for the young to be silent in front of their elders, when they should make way for them or stand up in their [b] presence, the care of parents, hair styles, the clothes and shoes to wear, deportment, and everything else of that sort. Don’t you agree? I do.

I think it’s foolish to legislate about such things. Verbal or written decrees will never make them come about or last.

How could they?

At any rate, Adeimantus, it looks as though the start of someone’s education determines what follows. Doesn’t like always encourage like? [c]

It does.

And the final outcome of education, I suppose we’d say, is a single newly finished person, who is either good or the opposite.

Of course.

That’s why I wouldn’t go on to try to legislate about such things.

And with good reason.

Then, by the gods, what about market business, such as the private contracts people make with one another in the marketplace, for example, or contracts with manual laborers, cases of insult or injury, the bringing [d] of lawsuits, the establishing of juries, the payment and assessment of whatever dues are necessary in markets and harbors, the regulation of market, city, harbor, and the rest—should we bring ourselves to legislate about any of these?

It isn’t appropriate to dictate to men who are fine and good. They’ll easily [e] find out for themselves whatever needs to be legislated about such things.

Yes, provided that a god grants that the laws we have already described are preserved.

If not, they’ll spend their lives enacting a lot of other laws and then amending them, believing that in this way they’ll attain the best.

You mean they’ll live like those sick people who, through licentiousness, aren’t willing to abandon their harmful way of life?

That’s right.

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And such people carry on in an altogether amusing fashion, don’t they? Their medical treatment achieves nothing, except that their illness becomes worse and more complicated, and they’re always hoping that someone will recommend some new medicine to cure them.

That’s exactly what happens to people like that.

And isn’t it also amusing that they consider their worst enemy to be the person who tells them the truth, namely, that until they give up drunkenness, overeating, lechery, and idleness, no medicine, cautery, or surgery, [b] no charms, amulets, or anything else of that kind will do them any good?

It isn’t amusing at all, for it isn’t amusing to treat someone harshly when he’s telling the truth.

You don’t seem to approve of such men.

I certainly don’t, by god.

Then, you won’t approve either if a whole city behaves in that way, as we said. Don’t you think that cities that are badly governed behave exactly like this when they warn their citizens not to disturb the city’s whole [c] political establishment on pain of death? The person who is honored and considered clever and wise in important matters by such badly governed cities is the one who serves them most pleasantly, indulges them, flatters them, anticipates their wishes, and is clever at fulfillling them.

Cities certainly do seem to behave in that way, and I don’t approve of it at all.

What about those who are willing and eager to serve such cities? Don’t [d] you admire their courage and readiness?

I do, except for those who are deceived by majority approval into believing that they are true statesmen.

What do you mean? Have you no sympathy for such men? Or do you think it’s possible for someone who is ignorant of measurement not to believe it himself when many others who are similarly ignorant tell him [e] that he is six feet tall?

No, I don’t think that.

Then don’t be too hard on them, for such people are surely the most amusing of all. They pass laws on the subjects we’ve just been enumerating and then amend them, and they always think they’ll find a way to put a stop to cheating on contracts and the other things I mentioned, not realizing that they’re really just cutting off a Hydra’s head.
³

Yet that’s all they’re doing.
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I’d have thought, then, that the true lawgiver oughtn’t to bother with that form of law or constitution, either in a badly governed city or in a well-governed one—in the former, because it’s useless and accomplishes nothing; in the latter, because anyone could discover some of these things, while the others follow automatically from the ways of life we established.

What is now left for us to deal with under the heading of legislation? [b]

For us nothing, but for the Delphic Apollo it remains to enact the greatest, finest, and first of laws.

What laws are those?

Those having to do with the establishing of temples, sacrifices, and other forms of service to gods, daemons, and heroes, the burial of the dead, and the services that ensure their favor. We have no knowledge of these things, and in establishing our city, if we have any understanding, we won’t be persuaded to trust them to anyone other than the ancestral guide. And [c] this god, sitting upon the rock at the center of the earth,
⁴
is without a doubt the ancestral guide on these matters for all people.

Nicely put. And that’s what we must do.

Well, son of Ariston, your city might now be said to be established. The [d] next step is to get an adequate light somewhere and to call upon your brother as well as Polemarchus and the others, so as to look inside it and see where the justice and the injustice might be in it, what the difference between them is, and which of the two the person who is to be happy should possess, whether its possession is unnoticed by all the gods and human beings or not.

You’re talking nonsense, Glaucon said. You promised to look for them yourself because you said it was impious for you not to come to the rescue of justice in every way you could. [e]

That’s true, and I must do what I promised, but you’ll have to help.

We will.

I hope to find it in this way. I think our city, if indeed it has been correctly founded, is completely good.

Necessarily so.

Clearly, then, it is wise, courageous, moderate, and just.

Clearly.

Then, if we find any of these in it, what’s left over will be the ones we haven’t found?

Of course.
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Therefore, as with any other four things, if we were looking for any one of them in something and recognized it first, that would be enough for us, but if we recognized the other three first, this itself would be sufficient to enable us to recognize what we are looking for. Clearly it couldn’t be anything other than what’s left over.

That’s right.

Therefore, since there are four virtues, mustn’t we look for them in the same way?

Clearly.

Now, the first thing I think I can see clearly in the city is wisdom, and [b] there seems to be something odd about it.

What’s that?

I think that the city we described is really wise. And that’s because it has good judgment, isn’t it?